Subject: Re: News server authentication - how?

From: "Chillin' Dannyman" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 7 Jan 1997 16:17:38 -0600

I have access to some newsgroups on my local server only via
authentication, otherwise they'll turn up a "not-found" I've read that
pine 3.95 allows authentication at the news server, but I can not figure
out how to specify that it should authenticate, what must I do to get pine
to login to the news server? It connects just fine for reading and
posting, but if I want to see these certain groups, well, I must
authenticate ...

	TIA, and if any replies could be Cc:ed to email I'd greatly
appreciate, because then I can't miss the reply. :)

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From: Mike Brudenell <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 8 Jan 1997 10:32:32 +0000 (GMT)

Pine will prompt you to enter authentication information when the news
server tells it that it can't do something without authenticating; there
is nothing to configure manually.

Your problem is that you're in a bit of a halfway house: the most
common scenarios are:

1.  Unrestricted access to users for reading or posting.

2.  Unrestricted access for reading, but must authenticate before a
    posting is accepted.

3.  Must authenticate before any reading or posting is allowed.

Pine 3.95 handles all the above scenarios without any manual
configuration.

However it sounds like your server allows limited news reading (and
posting?) without authentication, and access to additional newsgroups
after authentication?

I'm not too sure whether Pine will interwork with this setup (Pine Team?).

The reason for my suspicion is that when it sends a "GROUP" command to the
server to try and open one of the additional groups your news server is
responding something like "No such group" (because you aren't
authenticated).  This is the same message that would be sent out if the
group really didn't exist.

Pine is watching for the "Authentication required for command" message to
trigger it into prompting you to supply it with the necessary information.
Because it doesn't see this it doesn't ask you, and without it your news
server won't grant access.

So my horrible suspicion is that you may not be able to get Pine -- at
least not version 3.95 -- to give you access to the additional newsgroups
on your server.  Your only hope would be to see if your News Administrator
might consider moving to one of the above three setups.

Caveat: I may be wrong about this.  Anyone on the Pine Team care to
        comment?

Cheers,

-- 
Mike Brudenell                                         <[email-masked]>
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Computing Service, University of York, Heslington, York, YO1 5DD, UK
Tel: +44-1904-433811  FAX: +44-1904-433740  http://www.york.ac.uk/~pmb1/

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From: [email-masked] (Robert Miles)
Date: 20 Jan 1997 10:19:52 -0500

In article <[email-masked]>,
>is nothing to configure manually.
[snip]

>group really didn't exist.
[snip]

Here's an idea to try on such a setup (untested, since I have no access to
such a setup):

Choose a high-volume newsgroup that requires authentication (preferably not
one you really want to read, but one that will almost always have a new
article available), and put it first on the list of subscribed newsgroups.
When reading news, always read one article from this newsgroup to force
authentication, then use "q" to move on the the newsgroups you want to
read.

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